A survey on mobility-induced service migration in the fog, edge, and related computing paradigms

The final publication is available at ACM via http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3326540With the advent of fog and edge computing paradigms, computation capabilities have been moved toward the edge of the network to support the requirements of highly demanding services. To ensure that the quality of such services is still met in the event of users’ mobility, migrating services across different computing nodes becomes essential. Several studies have emerged recently to address service migration in different edge-centric research areas, including fog computing, multi-access edge computing (MEC), cloudlets, and vehicular clouds. Since existing surveys in this area focus on either VM migration in general or migration in a single research field (e.g., MEC), the objective of this survey is to bring together studies from different, yet related, edge-centric research fields while capturing the different facets they addressed. More specifically, we examine the diversity characterizing the landscape of migration scenarios at the edge, present an objective-driven taxonomy of the literature, and highlight contributions that rather focused on architectural design and implementation. Finally, we identify a list of gaps and research opportunities based on the observation of the current state of the literature. One such opportunity lies in joining efforts from both networking and computing research communities to facilitate future research in this area.Peer ReviewedPreprin

Service Mobility in Mobile Networks

In the current mobile network architecture, network traffic between user equipment (UE) and services deployed on the public cloud is tromboned towards the anchor point which could lead to network congestion. Deploying services closer to the UE, for example near the eNodeB, is a potential solution. The services are deployed on small scale data centers connected to, or collocated with the eNodeB, called ’eNodeB-Cloud’ (eNBC). Mobility of UEs presents a challenge for deploying services in an eNBC. When the UE is handed over from one eNodeB to another, seamless migration of UE context between the service instances running in different eNBCs needs to be ensured. In this thesis, we propose a Platform as a Service framework to enable UE context migration between eNBCs. The architecture consists of handover signaling mechanism, network session migration technology, context transfer protocol and a set of APIs towards the service. The evaluation of the prototype implementation shows that virtualization causes some extra delays to the UE context migration time. Whereas when virtualization is omitted, the time taken to migrate a UE context between two eNBCs is in the order of 12 ms on average, which is within the limit of handover interruption time between two LTE-eNodeBs